Networking problem - Fedora 8

I burned a Fedora 8 live CD this afternoon. Works fine. Decided to install it on my hard drive. That also worked. I have a single ethernet card, which I configured with a fixed IP address (192.168.x.y). Set the gateway to be my internet firewall machine.

However, when I reboot the machine, it configures the IP address, and then a few seconds later, decides that it needs to run dhcp (which I explicitly disabled, along with disabling IPv6). When the dhcp request times out, the system resets my IP address to 169.24.x.y - and then it can't locate my network at all....

Several questions - I really need to fix this - I need this machine back on the net...

1) How do I stop this from happening? It needs to believe that I want the static IP address

2) What is avahi-daemon? Do I need to have it running? One of the config files says it should not be used if network discovery isn't being done - and it isn't in this system... How do I turn it off??

3) Unrelated to networking - Fedora 8 installs only Gnome and I prefer KDE.
Once the network is running, will 'yum install kde' install all the kde software?
If I want to try kde4, what is the correct way to install that instead of kde3?

I burned a Fedora 8 live CD this afternoon. Works fine. Decided to install it on my hard drive. That also worked. I have a single ethernet card, which I configured with a fixed IP address (192.168.x.y). Set the gateway to be my internet firewall machine.

However, when I reboot the machine, it configures the IP address, and then a few seconds later, decides that it needs to run dhcp (which I explicitly disabled, along with disabling IPv6). When the dhcp request times out, the system resets my IP address to 169.24.x.y - and then it can't locate my network at all....

Several questions - I really need to fix this - I need this machine back on the net...

1) How do I stop this from happening? It needs to believe that I want the static IP address

Click to expand...

Did you use System > Administration > Network to set the static ip?

nbc said:

2) What is avahi-daemon? Do I need to have it running? One of the config files says it should not be used if network discovery isn't being done - and it isn't in this system... How do I turn it off??

Click to expand...

System > Administration > Services. Uncheck it for level 5.

nbc said:

3) Unrelated to networking - Fedora 8 installs only Gnome and I prefer KDE.
Once the network is running, will 'yum install kde' install all the kde software?

Click to expand...

Applications > Add / Remove Software. Right side of the screen. KDE is probably already checked as installed. Can you log out and log back in, but click 'session' and choose KDE?

nbc said:

If I want to try kde4, what is the correct way to install that instead of kde3?

1) Originally I set the static IP during the Live CD install scripts. After rebooting and having the problem, I used the network admin program to play with it - the IP address is set up correctly - the problem is it insists on overriding it with a dhcp request and I even though dhcp is not enabled or configured on that device, it still does it - I need to know how to stop the dhcp override.

2) I can disable it - but should I?

3) I think KDE is not installed during the live cd install. It is not available as a 'new session' option. The Add/Remove software program doesn't run because it can't connect to the network to examine the repositories...

I seem to have solved the problem - but I'm not sure I believe the solution. Figured I would post it just for the record.

The day after I loaded Fedora 8 (and it was giving me all this grief) the system started screaming like a 747 on takeoff - one of the fans in the case appears to be breaking... I shut the machine down. This afternoon I pulled out the fan and popped in a new one.

Rebooted the machine - the network card came up 'inactive'. I used the network gui tool and hit the 'activate' button. Loaded my static IP address and has been running fine since....

I successfully did a 'yum update' and rebooted with the updated kernel. Same thing - the network card does not come up on boot - I think it should according to the config files. But as soon as I start it, the system appears to be working properly.